I think that with the right resources at hand, a game developer can create more user friendly and games more quickly than they can today if the developer was to start using SVG (vector) to create the images and games. Has anybody tried developing games in SVG yet? Would you like to give it a try?

If you are a game developer with SVG experience, I would definitely like to chat with you! If you are interested in developing a game in SVG, I would like to chat with you. If you just want to kick the tires, I'm "game" for that too!

There's a new online animated photo animation tool that allows users to upload photos, take selected parts from each and put them into a single animated photo, all while online. The site is a bit weak on user help and not many animation attributes at this moment; but, these will be added soon. The image quality will improve soon as well; however, it still gives you a headstart over where you are at today.

It is believed that this online tool will help game developers create their animations faster once they learn how to use this tool. Additional animation attributes will be added soon. I think that within 6-8 months you will be able to knock out at least 50% of your development time.

The online animation code is open sourced so you can do whatever you want with it.

I don't see in what way using SVG's would increase productivity at all or how that tool would help

I don't see it either.But I want to add SVG support to my engine. It is very useable for Text-Rendering and for Buttons or other GUI-Elements.It would increase Quality but also add another "tool" dependency...It is up to the artist and the engine but SVG has a great scaleability.

I never thought about SVG-Animation... Maybe. But I don't see a real use point.

You might want to consider trying us out. Upload a photograph (24 bit) that's less than 490,000 pixels at Pac-n-Zoom.com and convert it to SVG. Then if you want to do special effects to it, just bring it back into Inkscape or whatever. It should give you a few more options you didn't previously have. As we add more SVG animation functions you can create games completely in SVG. SVG can and will give you things in games you can't easily get today.

Yesterday we added raster background as an option. The raster background would be placed in an SVG "wrapper", so to speak. The SVG animation would go in front of the background. The raster background gives you a higher quality background and smaller file sizes. In a few months an SVG background will become the preferred choice because it will have the higher quality and smaller file size.

Next Monday I'll share with you some of the reasons you want to consider using Animated SVG in games and how SVG can increase productivity and interaction with the users.

It is believed[by whom?]that this online tool will help game developers create their animations faster once they learn how to use this tool.

Customarily it is polite to not beat around the bush, but to openly admit you made (or helped make) the tool.Your entire post never actually comes out and says it (your second post lets it slip out, but it's pretty obvious anyway), and in fact the entire thread title is pretending to be about vector images. "Anybody develop (or interested in developing) games using SVG, Scalable Vector Graphics?" isn't the topic, "Hey, check out this tool I made and give me feedback" is the real topic (which is fine... if you're honest about it).

Additional animation attributes will be added soon. I think that within 6-8 months you will be able to knock out at least 50% of your development time.

That's a pretty extreme claim. I can knock 50% off my programming, music composing, drawing, scripting, and level design by using your art program?

7 of 5 doctors agree that that statistic looks like it was pulled out of thin air. Even if you simply mean 50% of my art production time, that statistic is still an extreme overestimation (Actually, technically it's not even an estimation, since estimating is a logical deduction. It's a guess, not an estimation). The vast majority of my art creation time goes towards creating the art, not re-rendering it at different resolutions or converting it between file formats.

50% = made up at random (at least it seems so).And the '6 to 8 months' = also made up at random."It is believed" = Youclaim, nobody believes it."I think that within 6-8 months you will be able to knock out at least 50% of your development time."You don't think that - you (wildly) guess or claim that without a solid basis for it (or without giving a solid basis). There is a big difference.

Your post seems like an infomercial. In general, people don't like feeling like they are being tricked - your post seems deceptive in at least four different ways: false pretense at what the thread topic is about, written almost as if you are an unbiased third party, claims of benefits that aren't accurate or scientific in nature, and claims that other unbiased people feel the same way. You'd probably have better luck if you are just straight-forward and to the point.

I don't know whether you are trying to be deceptive or not - I don't think you are - but my advice for your marketing attempts is to really rethink how you present your tools (and how you present yourself), because it certainly sounds (poorly) deceptive and fake, and it gives me and possibly others a bad taste in their mouth before they even learn what your tool is or who you are.

PnZjerry, I don't think you understand game development. Your tools is great, but hardly usable for game development. "knock out 50% of your time", "how SVG can increase productivity and interaction with the users" are some pretty wild marketing claims!

There have been vector-art games out there since 1980s, and just the fact it's vector art does not make it easier to develop, or "increase interactions with users."

Btw, judging from your web design, it looks like you haven't been on the web since 1990, there's this thing called Flash games. Look it up. The majority of the games there uses vector art.

@6677 Inkscape limits you to 64 colors and at their best, 256 poor colors. Our technology gives you 16.7 million colors. When we add our "shape grouper" in about 2-3 months, we will give you vectorized photos at photographic quality. It should save you some steps as you create your desired image.

When we add our core technology in about 6-8 months, you will be able to (for example) capture the Daytona 500 on film and animate it in very short order. With SVG it can easily be made very interactive with the users. I'll address this part of it tomorrow so that "Servant of the Lord" can get a better grasp of it. Obviously he isn't a happy camper.

@Servant of the Lord: Thank you for your feedback and comments; however, I think you read my post on the wrong side of your bed. I'll address your comments tomorrow'ish. Sure, I didn't give you enough information; however, it is clear that you are not an open-minded thinker? I'll give you more information tomorrow and you can decide then if you want to be an early-adopter or a me-too kind of guy. Either way, let others decide for themselves.

BTW--I didn't make,nor help make, the tool. And, the thread is about vector (SVG) and trying give people an opportunity to animate SVG online...for free no less. You might want to re-read the thread title and first couple paragraphs. I think you saw the 50% statement and your eyes crossed. Please name one product that lets anybody animate SVG photographs online. I'm not talking about line art or tracing. Check out Google's SVG-Edit and try to upload a photograph and animate it online. If you can find one then try uploading a photograph on their site and animating it, then try it on ours. Sure, our site isn't cool, doesn't have a bunch of busy gammer stuff on it, and is a bit akward to use at the moment, but hey, it IS a pre-launch product and the animation site is meant just to be something to show developers how our technology works & how they can take our open-sourced animation tool and create a cool website or app of their own with all that busy gammer stuff on it. Um, did I mention it is free at this time?

For those of you who don't know, SVG is capable of being extremely interactive with a user. You can't get that kind of interaction in Flash.

Again, I'll give you something Wednesday or Thursday with more detail and address most of your comments.

For those of you who don't know, SVG is capable of being extremely interactive with a user. You can't get that kind of interaction in Flash.

Flash (or more accurately Actionscript) is Turing complete.

I think you need to stop, carefully consider your current audience (professional game developers), the terminology that they are familiar with, the level of understanding they have of their domain of expertise, what they care about, and rethink how you phrase your advertisements.

@6677 Inkscape limits you to 64 colors and at their best, 256 poor colors.

Err, what? I use Inkscape all the time, it has standard RGB/CMYK color and transparency like pretty much every other graphics program out there.

I want to help design a "sandpark" MMO. Optional interactive story with quests and deeply characterized NPCs, plus sandbox elements like player-craftable housing and lots of other crafting. If you are starting a design of this type, please PM me. I also love pet-breeding games.

Agreed Inkscape can do 16.7million colours too, just like Flash, or Illustrator.

While SVG's do have some use, making cartoony graphics with clean lines, or rescalable UI and buttons, this software doesn't appear to solve any problems? Not only is converting a photo to a vector relatively useless - why do you want to scale a photo up that much, you could just load more, most cameras take photos at a very high resolution - vectors are also very low performance compared to standard bitmap data. I don't see any GPU's out there that let you push SVG points.

Unless your photo is very repetitive, you are going to end up with an SVG rectangle for every pixel, making very little space gain (if not negative, SVG is stored in XML), and also reducing rendering performance.

Flash less interactive than your app? You could develop the Flash IDE in Flash theoretically.

Sure, that may or may not be true, but before that's even relevant you need to convince us that animating SVG photographs is something we actually want to do. Game developers have existing tools and processes that are very efficient and effective -- what are the benefits of switching to your technology?

You might also research your competition more extensively, as your claims about colour limitations and a lack of interactivity in Flash are simply incorrect.

I can't see how this would help me with game development. How many actually uses photos for their games? Also everything you show on the site looks bad. All the edges are jagged. Even if I wanted to do a game with moving photos, I certainly would not use your tool.

The only unique thing you have is that users are able to "animate photos online". But why would I want to do that? Can I make the game online too? If I need to upload my photos, animate them, and then download them again to use them in my game, I might just as well use an offline tool.

From site: "We are the only ones who can convert a photo into vector at photographic quality."This is not true, and your tool doesn't even do a good job.

BTW--I didn't make,nor help make, the tool.

That might be true, but you are clearly with the company responsible for marketing the tool, which is pretty much the same thing. Once again you are being deceptive.

I think SVG actually could have a use in game development, specially on mobile platforms were you need to support a wide variety of resolutions with the same binary.
But not for pixmaps/photos, but for actual vector graphics designed by an artist, that then would be rendered to create sprites on startup, and after that everything would work as normal, but with crisper edges

So I can't say I see any use for this in our art pipeline either.
Being a vector format, SVG is not really very suitable for storing pixmap data, which is pretty obvious on your _huge_ (for what they contain), example svgs.
And I must say you have a very liberal interpretation of the word "photographic quality"

Also, apart from being deceptive, you phrase your advertisements as if you are talking with children.
Why are you even trying to be underhanded with these posts, when you are listed as the _contact_person_ on the company web page?
No-one will even think twice about a marketing rep coming here trying to sell their products, its even expected.

I'm sorry for the misunderstanding and causing anybody to thing I was trying to be anything but my intent, which was (1) as the title said, "Anybody develop (or interested in developing) games using SVG, Scalable Vector Graphics?", and (2) consider trying out this animation tool (guys its free, it's in Pre-Launch), and (3) I was looking for professional game developer feedback about SVG games. I didn't see the problem with asking.

Please remember this is a Pre-Launch product, warts and all (did I again mention it's free?). Our animation code is open-sourced as well. I'm not trying to sell a product.

Our file sizes are larger than you want at this time; however, when we release our core technology in about 6-8 months we will make SVG several times smaller than JPEG in file size and yet retain better than JPEG quality. I will leave you guys alone until that time comes; but, in the mean time there will be some game developer who will gain early-adopter advantages and I'm pretty sure of a few who won't fall in that category.

Regarding Inkscape and Illustrator being able to do 16.7 million colors, I don't think that is via Live Trace. We don't make SVG photographic in quality yet, that website statement should be modified. We have other places where we state high quality or near photographic quality, and it is pretty high quality as compared to most live traces that are done by Inkscape, Illustrator, CorelDRAW, VectorMagic, and a slew of others including RaveGrid.

To pick up on what Olof said about sprites, here is where we are headed...
We create the sprite inside the blitter , and we believe that would give you the ability to take real world data and put it into a sprite. The browser would be the animation engine.

SVG, HTML5, and advertising example: A user-targeted ad could let the user surf a wave at a resort beach, or sail a boat, drive a car, or sit in a movie theatre and view a movie trailor. A website user could be reading an article on the top 10 sports cars and a small vectorized sports car comes across the text and stops. The user could interact with that car by opening the hood or trunk. They could honk the horn or open the door. The developer could even give them the opportunity to upload a photo of himself, be turned into vector with hinge points, set in the car and drive off the screen. With SVG and HTML5 we can offer SVG responsiveness so the user can interact in ways that we don't think are possible today.

Okay, okay, I'm not asking to be tied on a stake and burned. I'm just throwing some things out there that can soon be possible with animated SVG within the next 6-8 months. If I've insulted some of you, please accept my apologies. Insulting, degrading, misleading, or trickng a bunch of experts is far from my intention. I'm just trying to open minds up to some possibilities.

My hope in creating the topic was for feedback and interaction on the use of, or potential use of SVG in animating games (not sales...did I mention our product is free??). Our animation tool is open-sourced with via Berkeley licensing.

Thank you for your comments and feedback just the same everybody. Perhaps we can converse again in the future on a more enjoyable note for all.

I'm sorry for the misunderstanding and causing anybody to thing I was trying to be anything but my intent, which was (1) as the title said, "Anybody develop (or interested in developing) games using SVG, Scalable Vector Graphics?", and (2) consider trying out this animation tool (guys its free, it's in Pre-Launch), and (3) I was looking for professional game developer feedback about SVG games. I didn't see the problem with asking.

1. people walked into this thread because they were probably scratching their head in trying to figure out why anyone is asking about developing games with SVG in the announcment part of the forum, ready to respond to some conversation, we are given:2. half way through the post, it changes to some blantant advertising for a "tool" that is "online" and can apparantly "speed up development time", you've yet to offer any reasons for why this is so, and their are thousands of free tools, that doesn't make them good.3. professional game developers are giving you feedback, they just don't like being tricked into using some tool that has yet to offer up any reason for being better than their standard pipelines.

Please remember this is a Pre-Launch product, warts and all (did I again mention it's free?). Our animation code is open-sourced as well. I'm not trying to sell a product.

Pre-launch of what, your tool? which you still haven't explained why or how it's going to better than current offerings on the market, you've made inflated claims without backing any of it up.

Our file sizes are larger than you want at this time; however, when we release our core technology in about 6-8 months we will make SVG several times smaller than JPEG in file size and yet retain better than JPEG quality. I will leave you guys alone until that time comes; but, in the mean time there will be some game developer who will gain early-adopter advantages and I'm pretty sure of a few who won't fall in that category.

no one has even mentioned, or cared abut file sizes at the moment, instead, we are asking questions about why it's better, which you are completely avoiding.

To pick up on what Olof said about sprites, here is where we are headed...We create the sprite inside the blitter , and we believe that would give you the ability to take real world data and put it into a sprite. The browser would be the animation engine.

the browser can animate sprites in the same manor that animating swg vector graphics give you, the only advantage to using vector graphics, is that in some cases, the animations can be more of a deforming/forming animation to a targeted image easier, but that's only suitable for if you are trying to achieve that particular effect/animation.

SVG, HTML5, and advertising example: A user-targeted ad could let the user surf a wave at a resort beach, or sail a boat, drive a car, or sit in a movie theatre and view a movie trailor. A website user could be reading an article on the top 10 sports cars and a small vectorized sports car comes across the text and stops. The user could interact with that car by opening the hood or trunk. They could honk the horn or open the door. The developer could even give them the opportunity to upload a photo of himself, be turned into vector with hinge points, set in the car and drive off the screen. With SVG and HTML5 we can offer SVG responsiveness so the user can interact in ways that we don't think are possible today.

first of all, you expect the user to go through the length of uploading an image just for an ad, or worse, invade their privacy and use a webcam to grab an image of them. then, your going to decode that image, and somehow figure out the person's body shape to create a bunch of hinged points, and bone's with those hinges, and finally your going to then be able to animate this created avatar of the person, on demand, on their PC. forget about advertsing, you've created a very advance piece of software, you'd be better off targeting kinect, since what your talking about is essentially doing what kinect does, but from just a color image off a webcam(or even potentially a high-quality image).

so, good luck with that. let's not forget that SVG is just an image format for describing a set of vector's to be drawn, so in truth this same sophisticated technology could be applied to any image format, rather it's a bitmap rastered image, or a series of vertice's. it doesn't matter.

Okay, okay, I'm not asking to be tied on a stake and burned. I'm just throwing some things out there that can soon be possible with animated SVG within the next 6-8 months. If I've insulted some of you, please accept my apologies. Insulting, degrading, misleading, or trickng a bunch of experts is far from my intention. I'm just trying to open minds up to some possibilities.

you haven't thrown anything out their, your making wild claims, and i've yet to see where the payoff is for a developer, you are being burned at the stake, because honestly, this sounds like an infomercial from a late-night off the air channel.

My hope in creating the topic was for feedback and interaction on the use of, or potential use of SVG in animating games (not sales...did I mention our product is free??). Our animation tool is open-sourced with via Berkeley licensing.

Thank you for your comments and feedback just the same everybody. Perhaps we can converse again in the future on a more enjoyable note for all.

some dev's use SVG's to contain their images, but you haven't made any case for why your system is better for Games. photo-realistic images are very rarely used in games, and are generally completly unnessary. so why your leading with that on a site dedicated to game development is beyond me.

I have some feedback for you -- I genuinely mean this to be constructive, and hope it is taken as such -- first on your approach to advertising, and then on your product and pitching.

Your advertisingAdvertising a relevant product is fine. We allow, and even expect such things in this community from time-to-time, and the same is true of many similar communities where you might advertise or look for feedback on this product. Do however make sure you're posting in the correct forum section, and simply state up front that you are marketing a product. I see that your product is currently available for free trials, but this is still a marketing exercise, and you would benefit by clearly labelling it as such to avoid any confusion.

Know your product, and know your audience. This community has a very technically skilled audience, and we have established tools and workflows that we already know very well. If you're going to make comparisons between your product and existing approaches, you need to be correct -- it really hurts your case when you make unfounded claims about the colour capabilities of InkScape, or the interactivity possible with Flash.

When making claims, be prepared to back them up. Don't say you have photo-realistic quality when your examples very clearly show that you do not. It's fine to say you will have it in future, but claiming it as a feature when it has yet to be implemented comes across as dishonest.

Your productWe already know about SVG, and more generally about vector graphics, and sometimes make use of these in our workflow.We also already know about HTML5 -- which is not a part of your product -- and it is seeing increasingly common use, with numerous libraries and tools now available to us.

Some of us may need to be convinced that SVG is a better choice than the raster or alternative vector formats we're already using. You would best approach this with a quick and to-the-point list of benefits, making comparisons to existing alternatives; you should however endeavour to ensure that your comparisons are both correct, and relevant. It is incorrect when you say you have support for more colours than Inkscape, because we already know Inkscape supports just as many colours. It is irrelevant when you say your tool will be better for storing photos than jpeg, because we only rarely use photos and almost never use the jpeg format due to it's lossy compression.

You then need to convince us your product is better than other available SVG tools. Why would we want an online rather than offline tool? What does your tool offer that other tools do not?

Hopefully some of that helps you to better present your product in future.